Thoughts about network neutrality

Our old friend Curt Monash has a think-piece about net neutrality up on his weblog. In it, he argues for ISPs to sell a premium service tier for high-bandwidth/latency-sensitive applications:

The current Internet [can't] well support … communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings.

A bold assertion. Certainly if t’were true the anti-neutrality camp would have a point.

I’m not 100% in either camp, but my gut tells me that today’s IP routing technology is holding up well. It’s the lack of investment in sufficient peering bandwidth and router horsepower that’s letting the side down. That and the criminally glacial progress towards IPv6, which would allow traffic prioritisation.

I think that in a high fraction of applications that amount to real-time communications, good quality will entail seriously sub-second latency. I don’t think it will soon be affordable to provide that kind of QOS for all traffic. Ergo, tiering. Until we get to unmeteredly-cheap, just-like-being-there transmission of full-room-sized sounds and images, there will be a place for differentiated QOS.

Here's the thing... Those of us that live the other side of the Atlantic live with 250ms latency every day, when we connect to services hosted in North America. I dare say the same is true for those on the other side of the Pacific. There's not much getting around the speed of light.

Yet stuff still works just fine. TCP is designed to get the best out of a latent connection. Even if that latency is unpredictable/chaotic (as is often the case with latency caused by congestion).

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